Tobias Ellwood, the chair of the committee, was alarmed by the admission. Britain was at greater risk at the moment, not just because of Covid-19, but because, as Wallace had attested, our traditional enemies were not stopping in their testing of Britain’s defences.

Worse still, by confirming the Council had not met, had not Wallace bequeathed an advantage to those enemies? The NSC, after all, is the only meeting of all the major figures involved in maintaining the security of the nation.

Covid-19 is Britain’s most serious national security event since the Second World War. But the UK was well prepared, according to international standards, for a pandemic that had for years been deemed a Level 5 national security risk — the highest level — in the National Risk Register, the formal measure of ranking the risks to the country.

In the 2015 Strategic Defence and Spending Review (SDSR), the foreword by David Cameron, then prime minister, mentioned the threat of a pandemic in the same sentence as the threat from Isis, Russia’s annexation of Ukraine and cyberattacks. It was also there in the foreword to the 2010 SDSR, and the 2017 National Security Review said: “…one or more major hazards can be expected to materialise in the UK in every five-year period. The most serious are pandemic influenza, national blackout and severe flooding.”

Suggested reading

Coronavirus is the wake-up call we need

By Tom Chivers

Yet despite this acknowledgment of the threat of a global pandemic, a disturbing picture forms: no one can recall, with any certainty, ever discussing pandemic preparedness policy at the National Security Council. One attendee, with the benefit of hindsight, said, “they never took it seriously”.

Speaking under condition of anonymity, politicians and officials who have served on it, in it and around it for the past decade paint a picture of disastrous structural problems in dealing with threats not considered to be “immediate enough”, huge issues with accountability, even once decisions were made, and of a perceived over-focus on specific, operational risk. The NSC, to quote one long-time attendee, had been “captured by the security services”; a perception that the focus become tilted more towards intelligence and immediate challenges than longer-term strategic aims.

It is only now, as the previously abstract pandemic now kills tens of thousands and causes an economic catastrophe, that the shortcomings of Whitehall’s national security apparatus are being laid bare. One NSC source said: “The crisis handlers are actually handling immediate crises, [those planning for one] are theoretical people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

It all started with the best of intentions. The NSC was formally set up in 2010 by David Cameron partly in reaction to the informal way in which decisions about the Iraq War were taken under Blair, and partly, says one, because they were “sort of copying the Americans”. It was, another says, established to “do the thinking that would then go across all the departments”.

It is all very secretly done and protocol strictly adhered to. Minutes of the meetings and the outcomes of decisions taken are closely guarded: sometimes, not closely enough. It is perhaps surprising, given how much of a toll global health insecurity can take, that the Health Secretary is still not an automatic member of the Council: another example of the types of security threats that were deemed most immediate and most worthy of the NSC’s time.

Suggested reading

All eyes on the Swedish coronavirus experiment

By Freddie Sayers

To discuss certain topics, a non-member Secretary of State would have to submit agenda items and be invited into the meeting. Those items would then be filtered by NSC officials over a lengthy period. Given the Council normally meets weekly, items would be put on the agenda three or four months in advance with the running order of that agenda discussed with the different departments over the preceding three to six months. Discussions were focused on those areas where ministers needed to make choices about what to do next: “this isn’t a ‘show and tell’ meeting”, said one senior official, “we need a decision [from it].”

But members of the Council were frustrated at what they saw as a lack of time for the politicians to be given the space to make decisions and interrogate the advice. “By the time we had heard from the deputy national security adviser, the Joint Intelligence Committee chairman, each of the agency chiefs, the Foreign Office’s Permanent Under-Secretary, the ambassador to the country concerned, and the Chief of Defence Staff, there was relatively little time for the senior ministers present to review and test the merits of the policy or findings in discussion,” says a previously long-standing member. “It became a cumbersome process with too many officials, and too little political input”.

In order to achieve decisions, those officials within the National Security Council (NSC-O) meet to refine agendas and coordinate departments, along with at least four sub-committees including one which looked after “threats, hazards, resilience and contingencies”. This sub-committee, despite having its membership listed at Secretary of State level, was “mainly attended by junior ministers”, and one of those who did attend said “there was one discussion of bio-warfare”, but at no stage did a need arise for senior ministers to make a decision on policy relating to a pandemic. “We never had it flagged as an issue,” said one former NSC official, “if there was no policy decision to be taken there was no particular reason for it to come back to the NSC”.

When asked about the types of discussions had inside the NSC, Liam Fox, former Conservative Defence Secretary, told the Rule Britannia podcast: “I always felt there was too little discussion about what one might describe as blue-sky thinking — what are the things that are not happening yet that we need to incorporate into our planning?” In describing the ineffectiveness of parts of Whitehall Rory Stewart, the former Conservative MP and cabinet minister, puts it more bluntly: “Nobody on the National Security Council wants to tell you what a total joke the National Security Council is.”

Suggested reading

Why this could be worse than the Spanish flu

By Gerard DeGroot

Given that pandemics were rightly identified as such a significant threat, why wasn’t there more discussion about a response? If the meetings became focused on ministers making policy decisions, could it be because policy towards a pandemic was settled outside the NSC: why ask for discussion and decision on a policy that causes no disagreement?

There was, after all, a strategy in place. In 2011, the Department for Health produced the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy that superseded a previous plan produced in 2007. The document “describes the Government’s strategic approach for responding to an influenza pandemic”, displays the “lessons learned” from the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic. Its target audience was health bodies, and the professionals within them, as well as children’s services and local authorities.

It was produced by the Department’s own Pandemic Preparedness Team in consultation with other departments deemed important to carrying out its directions. A senior figure in the Department of Health at the time recalls that the general response from the public health community was that the plan was as good as anywhere in the world and that the Department had put considerable effort into the preparation of it. Rightly, the document was discussed with the-then Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley.

Suggested reading

Has coronavirus defeated our armed forces?

By Mary dejevsky

But as Covid-19 arrived and spread, the policy advice, which even until very recently was being cascaded down to local NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups, had to be ripped up. It was inadequate. On mass gatherings, the document states that “there is very limited evidence that restrictions on mass gatherings will have any significant effect on influenza virus transmission”, and nowhere is the need for social distancing mentioned: the view was that those unaffected would be allowed to carry on with “business as usual”.

“We planned,” recalls a senior figure in the Health Department in 2011, “for an influenza pandemic, not coronavirus.” When asked whether there were similar plans drawn up in response to a SARs-like outbreak, a respiratory virus closer to Covid-19, the source said “we didn’t think about SARs in an influenza plan — we needed to think separately about SARs”. The source did not know if the department had done that.

So how was it that the lauded text on pandemic preparation, used as the formal guide by government departments and public health bodies nearly a decade later, and which set out the response to a Level 5 national security threat, and which then had to be ripped up, was never discussed by the National Security Council? According to one source involved in the 2011 strategy: “Why would you go to the NSC? Everybody who needed to have input had it. You’d call for the NSC to meet if the threat actually emerged.”

Surely this is a significant failing. How can the NSC be helping to protect the nation, its primary task, if those with the greatest responsibility for that protection never saw, discussed or questioned the only plan in place to tackle the greatest threat?

Suggested reading

Did anyone predict coronavirus?

By Tom Chivers

There are several reasons, as I see it, it failed in this task. The first, is that ministers did not push hard enough in tasking officials to show they had thought through the various possible scenarios. Preparation had only been done for an influenza pandemic but no questions seem to have been asked at NSC level about whether that template would cover other types of pandemics, or indeed whether plans for different types of pandemics had even been considered. As one NSC attendee told me: “There is nobody who has got the power and heft and who understands the problem who will say to their departments and officials, ‘You will spend another £100m on preparing kit.’ Putting things aside wins no votes.”

Another flaw can be found in the national security system in Whitehall as a whole. “David Cameron wanted the NSC meeting to be operational rather than strategic and Theresa May was mostly focused on domestic security and cyber,” says an ex-senior official. Liam Fox has said previously that the NSC “focuses too much on the traditional security threats, largely terrorism, and in recent times that has been more than enough of a threat to take up the time of the National Security Council”. In any case, even if emerging threats had eaten up more of the thinking of NSC members and even if decisions had been taken on those strategic threats, a highly-regarded security source asked, perhaps rhetorically, “who would be charged with following up on that?”

There is no doubt that many of the decisions made at the NSC have saved lives and protected the United Kingdom. But the fact that the policy response to the top-tier threat was not discussed at the top-table of our national security structure in the years before it happened, surely points to a weakness in the effectiveness and assiduousness of that system.

After correctly identifying a pandemic as a serious risk to the country, the NSC did not interrogate the policy response to it: a lack of oversight that would be unthinkable for threats from terrorism or kinetic warfare. Why does it seem that no one on the NSC asked to see the preparations? Why was time not built-in to discuss them? Either the National Security Council is where decisions about the UK’s responses to managing serious threats to the nation are taken, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, what is it for?

In the 10 years since its inception, the most august and important meeting of the most senior ministers responsible for the security of the nation did not pay enough attention to what they themselves acknowledged as one of the biggest threats. And not only did it fail to properly contemplate the British response to a conceivable pandemic, it has now gone missing during it, as the Defence Secretary confirmed.

If the system is not made more effective, more robust and is given a clearly defined purpose, not just to anticipate threats but to question the preparations for them, what happens next time catastrophe falls?

In response to the issues raised in this article, a Government spokesperson said: “We do not routinely comment on matters relating to the National Security Council.

“The government continues to protect the UK’s national security, while addressing the pressing demands of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We have been proactive in implementing lessons learned around pandemic preparedness. This includes being ready with legislative proposals that could rapidly be tailored to what became the Coronavirus Act, plans to strengthen excess death planning, planning for recruitment and deployment of retired staff and volunteers, and guidance for stakeholders and sectors across government.”

Where does this leave Britain? How should it define itself and defend its place in the world after liberalism? The Defence Secretary has asserted the need for strategic autonomy. And in his maiden speech, as reported on UnHerd, Danny Kruger spoke of the need for Britain to reject “an accommodation with one of the sterile new powers of the world, America, Europe or China” and fashion “a particularly British model, independent of the great powers”.

One way to assert our autonomy, paradoxical though it may seem, would be to deepen our bilateral strategic relationship with our closest European neighbour and historic rival, France. It may seem quixotic, but it is Macron’s France that is most clear-sighted in its apprehension of the new global order. We also have equivalent military capacity and a desire to preserve a role as an autonomous, mid-ranking power on the world stage.

As Macron himself remarked: “We have unparalleled reach. Basically, only the UK, via the Commonwealth, can claim a similar reach, although it’s decided to follow a different path.”

Suggested reading

How Brexit broke up the 'special relationship'

By Mike Martin

When Macron features in British political discourse, it is most often in his role as a lightning rod for political protest at home. It is a point no less true for being made to the point of cliché by Brexiteers that France is experiencing the most violent and wide-ranging political convulsions since 1968, nor that Macron’s throne is propped up by tear gas and truncheons more than popular acclaim. Were Poland or Hungary to have experienced such political instability, or to have repressed it as violently, they would certainly have aroused the condemnatory attention of British liberal commentators far more so than our Jupiterian neighbour has so far achieved.

Yet the acclamation of Macron as the strongman of the liberal order by anxious liberals keen to reverse the political trends sweeping across Europe misses the increasingly post-liberal drift of his strategic vision. His is a realist vision, shorn of idealist yearnings to remake the world according to the teleology of liberalism. It is keenly aware both of where real power lies and how to use it in France’s interests.

As French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian remarked in a major recent speech at The Hague, Europe has suffered from “the error of believing that we can ensure our place and security in a brutal and violent world simply through the example of our model and with our words”. Europeans need, Le Drian asserted, “to open our eyes to the reality of international power relations. In a way, we need to stop being naïve”.

It is in this difference, between a realistic acceptance of how human societies function and an idealistic vision of endless human progress towards a perfect future, that post-liberalism distinguishes itself from liberalism. Liberalism derives from its distant Christian heritage a belief in the perfectibility of man, and from Enlightenment thought the assumption that history moves inexorably in one direction. A post-liberal foreign policy, like Burkean conservatism, would accept that a nation’s politics derives from its own unique historical circumstances and that different societies are unlikely to share the same visions of the common good. Therefore, a cautious realism is both safer and more conducive to the happiness of mankind than the revolutionary idealism with which well-meaning, but misguided, liberal interventionists have torn nations asunder.

Suggested reading

Emmanuel Macron's alienating ambition

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Macron has considered these questions carefully. In his recent interview with the Economist in which he pronounced upon Nato’s “brain death,” he noted that:

“There is a deep current of thought that was structured in the period between 1990 and 2000 around the idea of the “end of history”, of a limited expansion of democracy, of a triumph of the West as a value system. That was the accepted truth at the time, until the 2000s, when a series of shocks demonstrated that it wasn’t actually so true.”

This is, of course, an outright rejection of the dominant ideology of late 20^thcentury liberalism: the quasi-religious belief that increasing trade would link the world in an ever-closer global system which would drag non-Western powers in the direction of a gleaming, liberal-democratic future. As Macron notes,

“The dominant ideology had a flavour of the end of history. So there will be no more great wars, tragedy has left the stage, all is wonderful. The overriding agenda is economic, no longer strategic or political. In short, the underlying idea is that if we’re all linked by business, all will be fine, we won’t hurt each other. In a way, that the indefinite opening of world trade is an element of making peace.

Except that, within a few years, it became clear that the world was breaking up again, that tragedy had come back on stage, that the alliances we believed to be unbreakable could be upended, that people could decide to turn their backs, that we could have diverging interests.”

Having perceived the direction of the Weltgeist, the former Hegel scholar has changed the course of French foreign policy towards the new prevailing winds, and not against them. Once lauded by anglophone liberals as Putin’s nemesis, Macron now seeks an accommodation with the Russian leader, attempting to draw Russia into a new security framework with Europe, and expounding his civilisationist conception of an autonomous Europe stretching “from Lisbon to Vladivostok”.

This is a vision of Europe shared, incidentally, with the Identitarian thinkers of France’s radical Right, and which perhaps accords with Macron’s recent decision to give a long, exclusive interview to the French Catholic-reactionary magazine Valeurs Actuelles, to the horror of French liberals.

Macron’s increasing references to political Islam as the dominant threat to European civilisation, and repeated warnings over unsustainable birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa have also alarmed French liberals — though they have drifted unnoticed over the heads of British Remainers looking longingly for a continental saviour.

Suggested reading

Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

On immigration too, Macron’s once condemnatory rhetoric towards Salvini and Central European leaders for refusing to accept Third World migration has not been matched by action: in practice, France under Macron has accepted as few migrants as possible, pushing attempted arrivals back to Italy with some force. Ritual condemnation of Orbán as a threat to European democracy has been replaced by a growing warmth between the two leaders, termed by some as the “Macron- Orbán axis”, with Macron aiming to use Orbán as a means to persuade the wary Poles to embrace his vision of rapprochement with Russia. “He’s quite close to our views,” Macron has said of the Hungarian champion of illiberal democracy, “and has a key intellectual and political role within the Visegrad group, which is important. That’s also the way we may be able to convince the Poles a little more.”

Pursuing this vision, Macron travelled to Poland to heal the bad blood caused by his previous critiques of the country’s drift away from liberal norms. His aim: to secure a military partner for France to fill the massive hole left by Brexit. Forced by geography to maintain robust defence spending, Poland’s rapidly modernising armed forces are, these days, a safer bet’s than those of Germany, now a superpower only in moralising, both unwilling and unable to assert its interests on the global stage. Yet Macron’s pleas for Polish involvement in France’s ongoing war in the Sahel, and support for French ambitions in Libya, serve only to highlight the centrality of the United Kingdom to any meaningful European project for strategic autonomy.

Within Europe, only Britain can match the expeditionary capacity of the French armed forces. Indeed, France’s gruelling intervention in the Sahel was dependent on RAF C-17s to airlift troops to Mali in the first place, and three RAF chinook helicopters provide vital flexibility to French operations in the Sahel even now; the mission will be bolstered by 250 British troops later this year. On the day we left the European Union, Macron observed of the UK that “it is in our common interest to define as close and deep a partnership as possible in defence and security”, and in the Economist he insisted:

“the British must be a partner on European defence. We’re keeping the bilateral treaties we upheld at Sandhurst. I believe that the UK has an essential role to play. Actually, the UK will be faced with the same question because the UK will be even more affected than us if the nature of NATO changes. So I see the bilateral relationship as essential from a military perspective.”

Both great world empires shrunk to mid-ranking power status; both nuclear powers and UN Security Council members, with commitments across the world derived from global trade and the flows of migration which followed our retreat from empire. France and Britain share interests and ambitions we are each unable to defend alone.

Suggested reading

Macron's Brexit plan

By John Lichfield

Decades of defence cuts have whittled our armed forces to the stage where we are unable to fight as anything other than a token auxiliary force to an American effort, fulfilling a similar niche in American doctrine as the Brigade of Gurkhas do in ours. Given that the global hegemon is itself struggling to maintain its presence in Iraq in the face of Iranian pressure, and is attempting, two decades into a bloody and unsuccessful war, to negotiate as un-humiliating a retreat from Afghanistan as possible from the Pashtun farmers who have outfought it, the advisability of a British government following the United States into further military adventures in pursuit of liberal goals is questionable at best.

Chastened in Southern Iraq and Helmand, despite the tactical skill and courage of our soldiers, Britain must seek a new role on the world stage commensurate with our abilities; it’s vital we accept that any attempt at strategic autonomy is meaningless unless we repair the damage decades of neglect have wrought on our armed forces.

Our new aircraft carriers are spectacular but undeployable in combat without escort ships we do not possess. Our army has been slow to modernise in recent decades, and has fought two long and bloody counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan at America’s behest with very little to show at the end of them. Until our capabilities have been restored and the lessons of our failed wars firmly learned, sharing capability through enhanced strategic cooperation with France seems essential for both countries in preserving some measure of autonomy in a global system torn between rising authoritarian powers and an increasingly unstable and erratic United States.

Suggested reading

Why is French democracy so prone to violence?

By John Lichfield

One shared plank of a post-liberal foreign policy would surely be a retreat from military adventurism where French and British interests are not directly at stake. The failure of the Arab Spring to bring forth flourishing liberal democracies in North Africa and the Middle East has wrought great damage on the fantasies of liberal interventionists, and its baneful effects have, in Europe, been borne most bloodily by Britain and France.

It was not foreseen by the cheerleaders of globalisation that civil wars in distant lands would lead to civilians lying dead by the dozen in the streets and stadia of London, Manchester, and Paris, but this is what came to pass. The Nato operation to unseat Gaddafi in Libya, a Franco-British project which dragged in an uncertain Obama administration, has likewise led, nearly a decade on, to the grim prospect of a conflict within the Nato alliance itself, as French and Greek warships engage in a tense standoff with the Turkish navy in the Eastern Mediterranean, and to a migrant crisis on Europe’s southern border likely to turn both Italy and Spain in an illiberal rather than post-liberal direction sooner rather than later.

Furthermore, it was as an unforeseen consequence of the intervention in Libya demobilised Tuareg fighters returned home to Mali with the spoils of Gaddafi’s armouries, sparking the bloody conflict France is still struggling to end.

Macron has mused repeatedly on the failure of the 2011  intervention in Libya to secure European interests, remarking this month that “it’s a country that has never known real unity”, and that “we took a path that never seemed right to me which is to say we don’t like this leader [so we’re going to] overthrow him, except we didn’t have a better leader to replace him with, and we find ourselves in this anomie.”

In his Economist interview, reflecting on the Arab Spring in general, Macron observed that:

“We’ve sometimes made mistakes by wanting to impose our values, by changing regimes, without popular support. It’s what happened in Iraq or in Libya. It’s perhaps what was envisaged at one point in Syria but failed. It’s an element of the Western approach, I would say in generic terms, that was a mistake at the beginning of this century, undoubtedly fatal, and sprang from the union of two forces: the right to intervene with neo-conservatism. And these two forces intertwined and produced dramatic results. Because the sovereignty of the people is in my opinion an unsurpassable factor. It’s what made us what we are, and it must be respected everywhere.”

Suggested reading

Macron's cunning plan for Europe

By John Lichfield

As a consequence of this newly realist assessment of European interests, France under Macron has deepened military ties with the counterrevolutionary governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and has shunned the US-led “maximum pressure” naval mission in the Persian Gulf, now helmed by a Royal Navy admiral in an attempt to persuade wary Europeans to join it. Instead, France leads its own European mission, aiming to secure freedom of navigation while maintaining the diplomatic outreach to Iran which distinguishes British and French aims from hawkish US policy.

Sharing Britain’s bases in Cyprus with France, along with our new naval facilities in Bahrain and Oman, would do much to bolster the effectiveness of British and French forces working together to secure our joint interests, and is a policy worth considering in our forthcoming strategic review. Deepened cooperation with French forces in the Sahel, though not a vital security interest for Britain as it is for France, would win us much goodwill from a powerful neighbour consistently disappointed by its German partner, and would establish greater interoperability between British and French assets which may prove useful in some future, yet unforeseen emergency.

This is, arguably, a Burkean foreign policy fit for a Conservative government: wary of military interventions to support revolutions whose bloody and chaotic end-states do not live up to the liberal aspirations of their cheerleaders, and reliant on European states acting in concert as sovereign powers to preserve their joint security in an increasingly unstable world.

Yet despite the hopes being placed by British post-liberals in Johnson’s government to forge a new path, it is the residual ideological liberalism of the Conservative government, expressed most vividly and disappointingly by the recent Huawei decision, which may present the greatest stumbling block to a Johnson-Macron strategic alliance.

Suggested reading

Have we been played by China?

By James Kirkup

The assumption that China is a neutral or even liberalising player on a competitive global market, unwilling or unable to exert political power through its economic might, ought to have been discarded on the rubbish heap with the other fantasies of the age of high globalisation. Macron has expressed a firm stance against Huawei, observing that:

“The day that everyone is connected to 5G with critical information, will you be able to protect and secure your system? The day you have all your cyber-connections on a single system, will you be able to ring-fence it? That’s the only thing that matters to me. On the other issues I’m business-neutral. But this is a sovereign matter. This is what sovereignty is all about.”

Similarly, France is threatening to block the sale of British Steel to a Chinese state-run company on the basis that it threatens French sovereignty over infrastructure essential to its national rail network.

Analysing British politics, Macron witheringly observed that the UK:

“decided to abandon sovereignty for a Singapore-type model, I would call it. Personally, I’m not so sure that’s sustainable. I discussed this with Theresa May, and then with Boris Johnson, because I think it was the middle classes who reacted and voted for Brexit. I think the elites stand to gain from that type of model. I don’t believe that the middle classes do. I think the British middle classes need a better-functioning European model, in which they are better protected.”

It is an ironic truth then, that Macron, the soi-disant saviour of liberalism, is far more sceptical towards the logic of the unfettered market than any senior British Conservative, and far more passionate about national sovereignty than any free-trading Brexiteer.

His foreign policy has pushed him away from the twin liberal fantasies of a global market and post-historical harmony, in favour of a shrewdly realist and increasingly post-liberal desire to secure his nation’s place in the world as it is, and not as it ought to be. In observing this radical shift in French policy, a Johnson government toying with post-liberal thought has much to study and perhaps to engage with in balancing Britain’s global and national interests in pursuit of the country’s common good.­­­